…In the course of her intensely lived life, Bamber, who helped found Amnesty International, once put a torture hood on her head to describe to a court what it feels like — the suffocation, the gagging and the panic in the dark — and has spent decades counselling people who will never recover from the bodily and mental insult.

You don’t get better after torture. It is the most isolating experience possible, and this is what the torturers intend. Every day, Bamber dresses with precision and elegance — it’s a form of armour, she agrees — and goes to her London office to sit with and listen to people who endured it.